Markets keep keen eye on war
Libby Lester says overseas buyers are watching closely the State Government’s bid to outlaw environmental protest
PICTURE this. A large lecture room so crowded that the more than 100 people attending the seminar struggle for elbow room. But struggle they do, taking detailed notes of the speakers’ presentations and using phones to capture slides. They confer quietly, comparing notes and figures.
Most attendees, apart from a few journalists, work for large forest, timber and construction companies. The two speakers, presenting information of illegal and unsustainable logging practices, work for environmental NGOs.
Needless to say, this event is not taking place in Tasmania. It occurs at the heart of the financial district of one of Tasmania’s largest export markets, Japan.
Protest and trade have a lot in common. They both move along increasingly large and complex networks, carrying goods or resources or images or messages from one location to another. They tend to work best when they travel far, attracting distant buyers or audiences who may be encouraged to intervene. And both seem far more knowing and purposeful than they often really are.
One only needs to ask those at the seminar in Tokyo why they have come, as I did as part of an Australian Research Council-funded project investigating transnational environmental campaigns in the AustraliaAsian region. Many of the attendees work for giant transnational corporations, with billions of yen invested in business interests that include timber to construction to banking and spread across several continents.
They have a common answer. They are here, squeezed side-by-side at lines of desks, because the NGOs know more about their supply chains and about the local places and communities from where they procure their timber than they do.
There is no doubt these corporate buyers are disquieted by protest at sites of procurement, such as Tasmania’s eucalypt forests or Sarawak’s rainforests. Some deploy bilingual staff to search the internet for evidence of social unrest in communities where they do business, and then try to understand the context, scale and potential impact of the conflict.
They occasionally send delegations to these places, although some corporate representatives said this was rarely effective, given local governments and industries tended to be selective about who the Japanese delegates met. For example, it often turned out that the indigenous leader they were introduced to in Borneo was not representative at all.
But they are more disquieted by the risk of being publicly shamed for misleading customers. Corporate reputation is closely protected in Japan, and companies fear public revelations that they have labelled their products as sustainably or legally harvested when they are not. This is especially so in the lead up to the Tokyo Olympics, when international eyes are fixed on Japan.
These transnational corporations have increasingly turned to environmental NGOs for information, and suggest that the NGOs’ global networks are able to credibly trace supply chains farther and deeper than they can.
This is relevant in several ways to the Tasmanian Workplaces (Protection from Protesters) Amendments Bill 2019 and Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s revival of plans to prohibit secondary boycotts for environmental reasons.
The first is that while many of our major export markets and their corporate buyers do not know or choose not to know what happens as far into their supply chains as they should, they are not stupid. Violent scenes in forest coupes or on industrial-scale agribusiness, if they reach them, will be researched — often in co-operation with international NGO networks — and assessed in the context of local environmental laws, product quality and price.
The second is that Tasmanian environmental campaigners worked out a long time ago that blockades are only one tool in their protest toolbox, and any community support quickly dissipates if not used sparingly. An effective tool is to monitor and provide information about activity at the site of procurement, perhaps backed up by the occasional spectacular show of dissent.
Media continue to come up with new ways to communicate dissent, carrying more images and ideas faster and further. Ban protest at workplaces or campaigns to encourage boycotts and export markets will not be fooled into believing that everyone is in agreement or local voices of dissent have been fairly heard. Japanese corporations buying Tasmanian goods will still try to carry out due diligence so as not to be seen to be ignoring their own corporate and social responsibility goals that are now so prominent on every corporate website.
A final point is the potential damage to Tasmania’s reputation, which my interviews suggest has still not recovered from what we in Tasmania might refer to as the Forest Wars, but the Japanese buyers refer to as “Gunns”. The Japanese companies were less concerned by protests than past poor corporate activity when discussing their anxieties about doing in business in Tasmania.
Many places in the world try to control environmental protest. Tasmania is far from alone. It is also true that groups such as Reporters without Borders and the Environmental Investigation Agency suggest that reporting on or protesting about the environment is a leading reason for violence and even death among journalists and campaigners.
Whether or not the proposals from the Tasmanian and federal governments to control environmental protest emerge from a desire to stem the flow of information about environmental concerns is largely irrelevant. They will be understood that way, and there is at least one major export market that will hear.